


Can your 'Science' explain why it rains?

by AliciaSinCiudad



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Also laptops and fanfic and google exist, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Gen, International Fanworks Day 2017, Not even gonna set it in 'After Scarif' because it's that silly.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-20
Updated: 2017-02-20
Packaged: 2018-09-25 14:47:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9825152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AliciaSinCiudad/pseuds/AliciaSinCiudad
Summary: From the following prompt from AO3:What does your favorite character—or your favorite pairing—get fannish over?





	

Cassian snapped the laptop shut just as Jyn walked into the room. She never understood why people did that. The risk that she would see something incriminating in the first few seconds of walking into the room was negligible compared to how much shutting the laptop piqued her interest. What Jyn did understand, though, was that there was no point to asking Cassian what he’d been working on. Cassian could be very private – decades as a spy did that to a person – and rarely gave away sensitive information when asked directly. Jyn, however, had not been living off her wits for so many years for nothing, and she figured there was a way to find out what she wanted to know.

“Hey, Cassian, just wanted to let you know that dinner’s ready.”

“Oh. Um. Good. Be there in a minute.”

“Right.” Jyn left Cassian’s room, but rather than going to the living room to eat, she just slipped next door into her own room. She hoped Cassian wouldn’t be too long. Ever since he’d started learning to cook, Bodhi had been making dinner nearly every night, with generally positive results. There were days when his cooking was just alright, maybe a little dry or a bit too garlicy. But most days, it was pretty good, and with increasing frequency, he cooked even better than Cassian, as though his relative inexperience in the kitchen left a door open for creativity that hadn’t been dulled by years of habit.

Jyn waited until she heard Cassian walk down the hall, then gave him an extra minute before she slipped out of her room and back into his. Smiling, she opened the laptop. Password protected. Of course. She typed in a few guesses – “Rogue1”, “B0D13R00K”, “chilaquiles”, but to no avail. She spent another minute rifling through his desk, trying to find other clues as to what he’d been doing, but Cassian was maddeningly Spartan, and she found nothing that shed any light on his secret. Not wanting to risk discovery, she shut the laptop, and quickly walked to the living room. Dinner smelled promising.

Cassian gave her a look as she sat down. “Where were you?” he asked.

“Bathroom,” she replied, grabbing a bowl and filling it with food. She noticed there was not a lot left.

“Good thing you got here when you did,” Cassian replied. “Bodhi made us save some for you, but I was ready to fight him over it.”

“That good, huh?” Jyn asked.

Bodhi looked down. “I, uh, I think it turned out alright. I’m learning.” He gave one of those microsmiles which apparently drove Cassian so crazy. Jyn had to admit, Bodhi could be kind of cute sometimes. Although, as his surrogate sibling, she could never admit something that positive about him out loud. It would ruin her credibility.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Just, uh, whatever I found in the kitchen.” Jyn didn’t know why she bothered asking, that was pretty much what Bodhi always said. Which made it difficult to request certain meals. She couldn’t bring herself to ask for “whatever you found in the kitchen last Wednesday”.

Any complaints about Bodhi’s vagueness, along with curiosity about Cassian’s secret, disappeared as soon as Jyn took her first bite. So good. The perfect balance of tangy, spicy, and sweet. She decided that Bodhi had officially surpassed Cassian as the group’s best cook.

“Hey!” Bodhi’s voice jerked Jyn out of her reverie just in time for her to grab her bowl back from Cassian.

“You can’t blame me for trying,” Cassian said with a grin.

 

 

Cassian didn’t have any illusions about where Jyn had been while the rest of them were eating dinner. He knew that shutting the laptop so quickly was sure to rouse her curiosity, but he didn’t want to risk her seeing the screen. Good thing his laptop was password protected, and his documents were protected with individual passwords as well, with an extra layer of encryption for good luck. He changed the laptop’s password at odd intervals just to keep things fresh.

In his old life, Cassian used all this encryption to protect sensitive information: highly classified documents, secrets that could put entire planets in danger. He sometimes felt a little silly using it for what he now had on his computer. But old habits die hard.

He felt restless as he cleaned the kitchen after dinner. Back when he was the main cook for their little group, he had insisted that the cook never clean up after a meal. Now that Bodhi had mostly taken over cooking duties, he sometimes regretted being such a stickler for that rule. He knew it was only fair, but what could he say, he was selfish. Plus, he liked to clean the kitchen together with Bodhi. There was something so intimate about doing chores together, it turned a boring task into an unceasing discovery of Bodhi’s little habits. The particular way he shook silverware he had washed before putting it into the drying rack, for example, or the way he stood on tiptoes to put things back on high shelves rather than grabbing a stool.

He was doing just that himself, stretching himself to get the cinnamon back in its place, when he felt someone hug him from behind. He dropped the cinnamon out of shock, but was proud that he had managed not to yelp. He heard Bodhi laugh, muffled as he kissed Cassian on the back of the neck.

“What in the Empire are you doing? I could have dropped something fragile!”

“What in the Empire? Is that a thing people say?”

“Oh. Yeah. Sorry. It’s, uh, it’s just an expression. But I won’t use it again.” Cassian was glad Bodhi couldn’t see his face.

“No, it’s fine. I defected, remember? And I wasn’t exactly a big fan of the Empire to begin with, I just didn’t have a lot of career choices where I grew up.” He shifted to Cassian’s side, and Cassian turned to look at him. “Anyway, just wanted to ask if you wanted help cleaning up.”

“But the cook should never have to clean up after himself,” Cassian protested weakly.

“Your rule, not mine. But if you’d rather be alone…”

“I didn’t say that,” Cassian said quickly.

“Good. Because if we clean together, you’ll be done earlier. And I was hoping we could watch some telly afterward. If you’re not too tired.”

“Sounds good.” Five years ago – Empire, a single year ago – Cassian would never have thought he would get so excited about such little things. But being so comfortably domestic with Bodhi was in some ways just as thrilling to him as the initial rush of attraction had been. “I get the dishes, and you do the counters?”

“Yes, Captain.” Bodhi gave Cassian another peck on the cheek before he went to grab a rag.

 

 

“Look! Can your fortune-telling explain _that_?”

“Ha! Can your ‘Science’ explain why it rains?”

“Yes! Yes, it can!”

Cassian grinned, and stole a glance at Bodhi. Bodhi was biting his lip, as though afraid of allowing himself to truly smile, but his eyes were shining. It wasn’t Bodhi’s first time watching _Avatar: The Last Airbender_ , but he had told Cassian that watching it together was like watching it through new eyes. Cassian liked the series enough as it was, but he particularly liked watching it with Bodhi, because of what it told him about his boyfriend – what things he laughed at, how he responded to the emotional parts.

It hadn’t all been easy. The episode about Jet had been difficult – Cassian related to Jet more than he liked to admit – and the night they watched that episode, Cassian had a nightmare worse than any he’d had in weeks. He’d been too embarrassed to admit to Bodhi that a children’s cartoon had affected him so much. But the choices Jet made, the band of child soldiers – it was a little too close to home. Overall, though, he loved the series, and it was a challenge to limit himself to one episode per night with Bodhi. He was barely more than half-way through the first season, and he was already writing fanfiction.

Which no one could know about. No one. Not even Bodhi.

All those methods of encryption would not be going to waste.

Cassian could be a very private person. He never told Jyn, for example, how much her friendship meant to him, and he scoffed at Chirrut’s faith in the Force, and at Baze’s faith in Chirrut. It took over a month for him and Bodhi to get together, since Cassian never expressed anything stronger than slightly-more-tolerance-than-usual towards Bodhi. In the end, it was Bodhi who had asked Cassian out, against everyone’s expectation, especially Cassian’s.

Despite his guarded nature, Cassian was also very proud. Standard was not his first language, but he was told that he had a way with words. Mostly by Bodhi, of course, and mostly with spoken language, where his subtly expressive face and that remaining trace of an accent worked in his favor. Still, he was happy with his writing, and while he was too embarrassed to share it with his close friends, he wanted _someone_ to read it.

He knew he shouldn’t be reading fanfic before finishing the series, but he couldn’t help himself. He managed to limit himself to stories marked “pre-series” or “season-one-divergence.” There was one author in particular he really liked, a certain Stars_and_Silence, who had written a number of pre-series Sokka-centric stories. Not counting his conflicted feelings about Jet, Sokka was Cassian’s favorite character. Having grown up hearing stories about Jedis, he had a special place in his heart for someone who _wasn’t_ magical. He liked that Sokka trusted in science and in hard work, in finding a solution. That he was willing to go outside of his comfort zone to learn from the Kyoshi Warriors. And the military background, specifically, the way he’d had to learn to fight as a young child, being thrust into the role of “adult of the family” after his mother died and his father left, really resonated with Cassian, who had lost his parents at a young age and had started training as a soldier at the age of six.

Stars_and_Silence had written a number of Sokka/Zuko stories, which Cassian hadn’t read yet because they were marked for season three spoilers. It felt strange, as a former spy, to be actively avoiding information, but apparently, this was what normal people did. He noticed that the author had also recently written a few Zuko/Jet stories, which he thought was an odd pairing, since as far as he knew, the two never even interacted. But maybe they interacted later on, and Cassian would rather find out watching the series than through fanfiction.

At first, Cassian just read the stories without leaving comments. But he found himself so drawn in that, after the third story by his favorite writer, he finally left a comment. “Amazing!” he wrote. “I am only half-way in the first season, so I know I shouldn’t read fanfiction, but you have such a way with words, I can’t help it! I love the way you describe Sokka’s love of the ocean, which must be complicated by his sister’s magical talents. I think the not-magical characters deserve to have their stories told, too, and I think you really bring Sokka’s personality to light. Thank you for sharing this. I look forward to reading more as I watch more of the series!” He was thrilled when Stars_and_Silence replied, thanking him for his message, and telling him to enjoy the series as it progressed.

 

 

 

Bodhi had always found refuge in his hobbies. He loved flying, he loved mechanics, and recently, he had fallen in love with cooking. He was a voracious reader – being a cargo pilot meant many, many hours alone in a ship, crossing the galaxy, and both visual and audiobooks had been his companions on many journeys. He didn’t remember when he’d first watched _Avatar_ , but he’d seen the whole series twice now, and was enjoying watching it a third time with Cassian. He’d even started writing fanfiction again, which he hadn’t done for a while.

As with most things, Bodhi was a bit shy about his fanfiction. He didn’t think he was a particularly good writer, he just wrote for fun. And anyway, who could he share it with? Chirrut and Baze hadn’t watched Avatar, Cassian hadn’t even finished the first season yet, and Jyn would surely just tease him for being such a nerd. So he posted online, and enjoyed getting comments from strangers.

Mostly strangers, that is. Bodhi had a sneaking suspicion that CaptainFantastic, who had only watched half of the first season, who made the occasional grammatical or lexical error, and who insisted on referring to benders as “magical,” was not a stranger at all. But he didn’t want to ask Cassian about it, just in case he was wrong.

He had, however, started writing Jetko stories. He had noticed Cassian’s strong reaction to Jet’s episode in the first season, and he had always related to Zuko a little. Unlike Zuko, he rarely expressed his anger, but it was there. And there was the social awkwardness. The truth was that Bodhi related to Sokka the most, but he just didn’t see the Jet/Sokka pairing going anywhere, so Jetko it was. He was careful to mark the stories as season-two-divergent, so that CaptainFantastic would know he could read them before he finished the whole series. Too bad it would still be a month away, the rate they were going.

He heard the door to his room start to click open, and Bodhi snapped the laptop shut. He cursed himself – he knew that closing the laptop quickly was far more suspicious than simply saving and closing the document he was working on. Ah well, too late.

“What are you working on?” Jyn asked, undisguised amusement in her voice.

“Oh, it’s, uh, it’s nothing.”

“Well in that case, I’m not curious at all,” Jyn teased.

Bodhi bit his lip. Could he trust Jyn? He saw the gleam in her eyes. No. No, he could not trust her. She was like the older sister he’d never had, because *he’d* been the oldest sibling in his real family, damnit. Something about years of working for the Empire as an underling, undergoing torture, and losing his entire family along with the city he’d grown up in, really took the wind out of him. No wonder he used fanfiction to escape.

“Well?” Jyn was still smiling at him expectantly.

“Why are you in my room?” he asked, hoping he didn’t sound as defensive as he felt.

“Just wanted to let you know Cassian and I are going for a run. Want to come with?”

“I’ll, um, I’ll sit this one out.” He’d gotten to a really good point in his story, where Zuko comes out about who he really is, and Jet realizes that he, too, has done things he’s ashamed of, has done irreparable harm to innocent people, and that he can’t sit in judgement of a Fire Nation defector. This would be where Zuko reminds Jet of his request to join up with him, and asks if it’s still on the table, and after some soul-searching, Jet would decide that it was.

Bodhi also wanted to get the Avatar Crew involved in the story somehow. He loved writing Toph. She was so different from him in nearly every way – confident to the point of hubris, always quick with words, steeped in privilege in a way that just added to her confidence in herself, allowing her to glide through situations even after she’d left the relative comfort of her home. He loved the way she brushed off her friends’ ignorance of what it meant to be blind, although he cringed every time someone made a “I thought _Toph_ was blind” comment. He was pretty sure that anyone making such a lazy ablist joke around Chirrut would likely get a staff-to-the-back-of-the-head.

“Alright, have fun with your _nothing_ ,” Jyn teased. “Good thing there aren’t any experienced spies or fugitives living with you who might find out your secret.”

Bodhi wished he could channel Toph in that moment, and come up with some incredibly witty retort. But instead he just glared. Whatever. The quicker she left, the quicker he could get back to his story.

He wondered if it was a little too personal if he wrote Zuko learning to cook for Jet.

 

 

Over the next couple of days, Jyn completely failed to get into Cassian’s laptop. Bodhi’s, however, was less of a barrier. After playing around with variations of “Rogue1”, “Cassian,” and “IAmThePilot,” she managed to get into his computer with “The3mpireSuXX”. From there, it was a simple matter of finding the most boring sounding folder. “Flight Logs” ended up being the goldmine.

Each of the documents was labeled as though it were a flight log, which just made her all the more sure that it was what she was looking for. Especially since the “date created” list continued up to the present day, and Bodhi hadn’t been anywhere in months. She decided to start at the beginning, and opened the oldest document to find:

 

 

 

> **For Love of the Ocean**
> 
> Sokka had always known there was more to the world than his ice-covered village. Not that he didn’t love the village – it was home. This tiny village contained everything and everyone he loved. But he knew that there was more to see. A world beyond. With strange landscapes and creatures, people who spoke and dressed differently, and somewhere out there, maybe even the Avatar, if he truly existed.

 

Jyn blinked. Was this… fanfiction? Bodhi Rook, accidental hero, daring pilot, rising master of the kitchen, and _secret fanfic author_? Oh, this was good. Very good. She would have to find a way to exploit this. She closed out the document and shut down Bodhi’s computer before he might have a chance to discover her. She figured she could look up the stories online anyway, now that she knew what she was looking for.

Back in her own room, Jyn googled “Avatar” and “For Love of the Ocean.” Bodhi’s story was the fifth thing down on the google search. In the safety of her own room, Jyn opened the story and read at her leisure. She had been hoping it would be overly sappy so she could tease Bodhi about it, but it was actually pretty good. Better than anything she could have written. Not that she cared. She didn’t need to write good fanfiction because she was amazing at so many other things.

Anyway, she was still the faster runner.

 

 

“Secret tunnel! Secret tunnel! Through the mountain, secret secret secret secret… tunnel!”

Cassian snickered. He’d met plenty of spaced out wannabes in his day, but this Chong guy took the cake. He glanced at Bodhi and saw that he was actually grinning, not biting his lip or anything. He decided to risk it, and said “I think we need to watch that part again.”

Bodhi paused the video. “Only if you sing along.”

“I will if you will.”

“And dance?”

“Of course.”

And so it was that Jyn walked in on Cassian and Bodhi flailing their arms and singing about a secret tunnel. It was not Cassian’s proudest moment.

At least she didn’t know about the fanfiction.

 

 

The best part about discovering Bodhi’s secret fanfiction was that she discovered Cassian’s secret fanfiction as well. CaptainFantastic? Really? Only Cassian would come up with a name that boastful. She was sure it was him; the author shared all of Cassian’s particular turns of speech. She wasn’t sure, however, if Cassian was aware that Stars_and_Silence was Bodhi. This was the part she was going to have fun with.

She started with leaving anonymous comments on the stories. First, just regular positive comments about the stories themselves. But then she started commenting on CaptainFantastic’s and Stars_and_Silence’s comments. “Wow, Stars_and_Silence, you seem pretty into CaptainFantastic’s stories, and vice versa. I’ll bet you’d make a cute couple! (; ” She noticed that CaptainFantastic didn’t comment on any more stories for a couple of days. Another time, she wrote on one of CaptainFantastic’s stories “Great story, very in character. I’m seeing some influence from Stars_and_Silence here, maybe you’re a fan? PS: Is Standard your first language? You use some very interesting metaphors.” She felt a little bad about that comment, though, when CaptainFantastic asked for a beta reader the next day. Not bad enough that she didn’t suggest Stars_and_Silence, of course.

When Jyn had tired of messing with their heads, she decided to just go ahead and out them to each other. So over breakfast, she brought up Bodhi’s experience as a cargo pilot. “It must have been both beautiful and lonely, flying solo all the time. Nothing but stars and silence.” Cassian choked on his caf, and Bodhi blushed.

Baze gave them an odd look. “Cassian, are you ok?” he asked

“Oh, I think the captain is doing _fantastic_ , wouldn’t you say?” Jyn asked with a wink.

“Baze, do you have any idea what is going on?” Chirrut asked. “I am not used to not knowing what is going on.”

“Jyn’s just… talking nonsense.” Cassian muttered.

“Wait, Cassian, is she right though?” Bodhi asked. “Are you CaptainFantastic?”

“No, Chirrut,” Baze replied. “I have no idea what is going on. And I’m not sure I want to.”

“Wait, are you Stars_and_Silence?”

“Er, yeah. I, I was kind of hoping you were CaptainFantastic. I was almost sure, but I was terrified of the tiny chance I might be flirting with a complete stranger over the internet.”

“Are you two on a dating website?” Chirrut asked. “Why are you on a dating website when you’re already dating?”

“It’s not a dating website,” Jyn said. “At least, not usually.”

“I’m so glad that you’re Stars_and_Silence,” Cassian said with a sigh of relief. “I was worried I was getting a crush on a complete stranger. I should have known, the language was too beautiful to be anyone else. How did you know CaptainFantastic was me?”

“I mean, the name, first of all. But also your turns of speech.”

“You mean my errors?”

“Well, that too.”

“You have the advantage, being a native speaker. But still, as a spy, I should have figured this out.”

“Don’t beat yourself up about it.”

“Cassian’s right, though,” Jyn said. “He should have figured it out. I mean, come on, the sudden interest in Jet after you two watched the Jet episode? The thing about Zuko learning to cook? The totally Chirrut-like way Iroh speaks in his recent stories?”

“I haven’t read the recent stories,” Cassian said. “Spoilers.”

“So this is a literary site?” Chirrut asked.

“In a manner of speaking,” Jyn replied. “It’s fanfiction. Avatar fanfiction.”

“And why do _you_ know so much about it?” Baze asked.

Bodhi and Cassian turned to her. “You’re the one who wrote that mean stuff about my language errors, aren’t you?” Cassian asked.

“I wasn’t trying to be mean,” Jyn said, “I was just teasing.”

“Try spending your life in your second language and tell me what’s just teasing,” Cassian muttered.

“Ignore her,” Bodhi said. “She’s just jealous that we’re better writers than she is.” He gave her a condescending look. “It must be difficult, knowing I’m so much better than her at everything.”

“I can still outrun you!” she shot back.

Chirrut turned to Baze and cocked his head. “I think I liked it better when I didn’t know what they were talking about.”

**Author's Note:**

> Avatar quotes are from "The Fortune Teller" (Book 1, episode 14) and "The Cave of Two Lovers" (Book 2, episode 2)


End file.
